bilingual | zweisprachig

Richard Powers, who received the National Book Award in November, wrote an essay for tomorrow’s NY Times Book Review about speech recognition software and the importance of dictation while composing a text. It is quite an interesting article which proposes that writers should go back to dictating their works to typists or, in Mr. Powers’s case, tablet PC’s.

He gives a lot of classic examples of writers who preferred dictation (F. M. Dostoevsky, J. Joyce, W. Wordsworth, J. Milton &c.), and apparently he himself has not typed a single of his last 500,000 words of his published fiction and a mere 10,000 e-mails were sent out without ever touching a keyboard.

I am not quite sure what to make of this, though. Some people, such as Mr. Powers, say that speaking the words while composing a text creates an immediate feeling for them, especially for their sound. Also, writers can record their thoughts just as fast as they think them, without having to wait for their hands to write it all down or type it up.

Then there are others, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who preferred (or still prefer) typewriters. F. Nietzsche said that using a typewriter changed his thinking process entirely.

And word processors changed it once again. Writers can easily erase what they just wrote or exchange one word for another. Here the words become ephemeral. They only exist as binary code bits composed of zeros and ones, until they are printed out. But what if the whole computer crashes completely before you can print anything and you have not made any back-up copies? When composed on a typewriter, words become eternal immediately, unless, of course, someone burns the pages.

It is unfortunate that pen and paper or typewriters have become unfashionable. Quite a big portion of a text’s myteriousness lies within the tool(s) with which it was originally written. Thomas Pynchon, for instance, still uses a typewriter. His letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which he defends Ian McEwan, was clearly typewritten and that alone gives it a certain aura of intellectuality, maybe even superiority (the good kind).

Personally, whenever I write an essay or any other text for that matter, it is a "hybrid" process of pen and paper and computer. It is a symbiosis that works quite well for me. All the thoughts come out on paper, in actual writing which probably only I can read, and the editing is done on the computer during and after typing up the words. Luckily, I do not have to edit a lot—at least I do not feel that I have to—and so I can say that most of my writing is done with pen and paper, notebooks actually. I would love to use a typewriter, though, just to see where it would take me.

Last night I read an NY Times article by Julie Bosman about an independent Princeton bookstore that has to close down after being in business for 26 years. It is a nice example of how the big chains are ousting the little ones. Both Ms. Bosman and the bookstore’s owner, Logan Fox, son of the supposedly quite well-known Joe Fox, see the reason in…

[...] the quickening pace of people’s lives, in the shrinking willingness to linger. During the 1980s, in the store’s early days, customers would come in and stay all afternoon, carefully inspecting the books that were packed tightly together, spine to spine.

The store in Princeton, nearby the Ivy League univerity, to which Mr. Fox sold it to, is called "Micawber Books." Ms. Bosman points out that this name is taken from Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. The fact that she has to explain the name’s origin supports both their claims that people do not read a lot anymore.

I am glad that I live in a city where most bookstores are still independent. It would be utterly devastating if "my" bookstore had to go out of business. I do not even want to think about it.

[In case the link to the article takes you to a login window it means that it is not available for free anymore. If you still would like to read it, though, and do not have an account just drop me a line in the comments and I will send you a PDF version.]

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Introducing a new feature to this weblog: Since I try to post every day I want to share my New Yorker Cartoon Calender with you because some of you might not have their own. All New Yorker cartoons are copyrighted but 99.9% of them are available on-line through Cartoonbank.com. So I will just put a link to the daily cartoon at the end of one of my daily posts. Today, there will be five cartoons because I have to catch up. Have fun, and do not wreck your brains over those you do not understand. I sympathize with you.

• The Day Before the Day Before the Day Before Yesterday (January 1. Duh!!)

• The Day Before the Day Before Yesterday (January 2)

• The Day Before Yesterday (January 3)

• Yesterday (January 4)

• Today (January 5) [This one really made me crack up.]